The rapid growth of both individual and public information has complicated the access of relevant, useful data in a coherent and efficient manner. Thus, for example, a user who types in the words “health” and “studies” in the search window of a conventional search engine on the world wide web is likely to obtain a listing of thousands of largely irrelevant entries concealing the few entries in which the user might actually be interested. Conventional systems do not enable the user to utilize the context of stored information to simplify the search process. Some attempt to help users refine his search, but not in a manner that is natural or intuitive. For example, summaries generated by prior art systems between two documents of a short length that are only slightly different from each other, differ from each other by just a few sentences. It will be seen that the short summaries generated by conventional systems are actually the same.
Prior Art systems also created a summary of the document, using sentences and/or sentence fragments from the document. Sentences can be ranked according to “core ideas” they contain, the relationships that they express, and are then scored using the information generated. This gives context to the summary. Although others previously have attempted to use a sentence weighting measure before to determine summaries, typically they were unable to determine whether a sentence actually made a significant conceptual relation to a given document. Also, such systems are unable to create variable length summaries in such a way that smaller summaries are more conceptually compact.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to provide methods and systems that will enable individuals to deal with large amounts of information in a coherent manner by creating better methods and systems to search, file, retrieve, and organize information. Such systems will allow users to search across large databases such as the Web and obtain highly relevant information regarding user-specified concepts and topics.
It is another object of the invention to provide such methods and systems whose ability to generate relevant results improves as the number of database items increases.
It is a further object of the invention to provide such methods and systems that suggest to the user further search terms and/or strategies to help the user focus his or her search.
It is still a further object of the invention to provide such methods and systems that automatically generate coherent, intelligent summaries of documents.
It is still a further object of the invention of provide such methods and systems that allow for greater intra-document analysis such as automatically generated indexes for books.
It is yet another object of the invention to provide such methods and systems that advantageously exploit the inherent structure of information communication. Examples of inherent structure in information include sentence structure, paragraph structure, and website construction.
It is still a further object of the invention to provide such methods and systems that can be used to organize a collection of documents in a coherent manner for an individual user, a group, or a network.
It is yet another object of the invention of provide such methods and systems that amalgamate the collected information in new ways to generate new knowledge and information such as collective concept maps or as comparative conceptual relevance with respect to time, technical level, sources, etc.
It is another object of the invention to provide such methods and systems that are simple and transparent for users to operate.